Category: OB Time Machine

San Diego Free Press – March 1969

Hippies Move To Ease Tension in Ocean Beach

(no byline)

Relations between Ocean Beach Hippies and the San Diego Police Dept. continue to deteriorate according to Ocean Beach residents.

Police patrolmen have apparently shifted their tactics from Field Interrogation type harassment to outright threats and intimidation. Officer McLean told a gathering of youths in front of the In-Between on Newport Ave –

[Originally published June 14, 2008]

by Marc Snelling

In case you didn’t know you were in Hillcrest , or AbNormal Heights there is a big sign to tell you. Same goes for University Heights, which despite the marketing does not have a university. Even streets have them.

Nothing says NEIGHBORHOOD! in San Diego like a huge sign on the main road.

This got some OBceans to thinking that our puny sign, and the first few blocks of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard were not a complimentary enough entryway to OB. …

Originally posted September 29, 2009

Editor: This is part of a irregular continuing series about Ocean Beach since the late Sixties and the early history of the first OB Rag.

1968: The Rowdy College-Surf Town Morphs Into Hippie Haven

OB was already well-known for its rowdy and irreverent culture of beach, surf & beer; but by 1968, it began its transformation into something more. Bleach blond long-haired surfers lived next door to long-haired hippies, and soon you couldn’t tell them apart. It became official: Ocean Beach had become the hippie mecca. Since the late sixties, Ocean Beach had morphed into the hippie hangout for the entire city. OB had become the Haight-Ashbury of San Diego, shadowing the more famous early birthplace of hippie-ism. But if you were young and a hippie in San Diego, you ended up in OB.

Local Radio Heralded Counter-Cultural Seventies Series Called “The O.B. Ranger Rides Again!”

Editor: We received this article from Jay Allen Sanford, who has been a San Diego Reader columnist and cartoonist (Overheard in San Diego, etc) for around 20 years. Sanford lived on Abbott Street in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and his first professional cartoons (ie paid) were for OB’s Strand Theater ads and newsletters (he’s working on a lengthy Strand article now).

By Jay Allen Sanford

“We were going after the progressive rock or the album rock crowd,” says radio DJ and programming vet Gary Allyn about his early seventies on-air gig in San Diego.

“We wanted an independent attitude of not giving a damn about anything because we could get away with a lot of that in Mexico. So our IDs and buffers had things you couldn’t say on American radio. We did quasi drug references. Like ‘It’s time for the scores’ – and the scores would be ‘four keys, two lids.’ With stuff like the O.B. Ranger routines, there was always that underground go-against-society undercurrent. Of course O.B. was the center of the hippie movement in that period, flower power and the drug culture and all that.”

By Dave Good / SanDiego.com / Jan 10th, 2012

The roots of the San Diego Zoo lie in Ocean Beach, California. That there is even a zoo here at all, world famous or not, is largely due to a chain of events that began in 1913 at the foot of Voltaire Street. On July 4th of that year the doors to the Wonderland Amusement Park were officially opened to the public.

In its time Wonderland must have been spectacular. Protected from the sea by high walls with exotic turrets it spanned eight acres of what is now dog beach.

A decade later, unofficial boycott of Starbucks continues among OBcians

This is the final segment of my four part series on the tenth anniversary of the anti-Starbucks campaign in Ocean Beach.

Plan A – the Formula Ban

The passage of Prop A – the Formula Ban of chain restaurants and other corporate-type businesses in Ocean Beach at the OB Planning Board elections on March 12th, 2002, had been a major boost for activists boycotting Starbucks. It had passed with more than three-quarters of the vote (77%) at the annual election – in a near record turn-out of voters.

Does the “Green OB” still have meaning in the OB of the 21st century? With only T-shirts bearing the “Green OB” nowadays, the verdant graphic with the letters “O” and “B” with the peace symbol being held up by a fist is more of a concept than a thing in Ocean Beach. But back in the 1970’s it had real meaning, and OBcians placed it in the windows of their homes.

What did it mean? What did it stand for?

The story of the “Green OB” goes back to the inception of the original OB People’s Rag, the hard copy predecessor from the seventies to this website.

(Originally posted May 4, 2010)
I was sitting on my porch this afternoon pondering the meaning of Kent State. I had more tears last year when I wrote a post about it. Yet – here it is – the 40th anniversary. Kent State, hmmm, OB, hmmmm. Something was there.

And then I figured it out! I figured out how Ocean Beach is connected to the Kent State massacre of May 4th, 1970. Or vice versa.

I was in college when it happened. I was attending UCSD and in my senior-year when it all came down. I had been involved in the campus anti-Vietnam movement and was deeply affected by Kent State,

The following article was originally published on March 24, 2011

This coming March 28th is the 40th anniversary of the infamous “Collier Park Riot” – an event that reminds me of the refrain from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” which claimed: “… hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year, ….”

And like the pre-Civil War America to whom Longfellow penned his famous poem, the Ocean Beach of the 21st century has forsaken its very own history that made it what it is today – a celebrated iconoclastic corner of the hippie counter- culture that has consciously set itself apart from mainstream Southern California. And it is true, that hardly a man or woman now alive who lives in Ocean Beach remembers that famous day when the youth of the community stood up to “the Man.”

At times the local planning committee for Ocean Beach acts in relative obscurity. Not by choice, however, for the individuals who serve on the 14-member Board want all the attention they can get. And rightly so – for the Board – which holds two open meetings every month – is really the ONLY publicly-elected body in OB, and is the expression of the people’s will in our little village. It’s annual election – which is this Tuesday, March 15th – is open to every resident, property owner or businessperson in Ocean Beach.

Here it is – the very first OB Rag – the OB People’s Rag – published on September 17th, 1970. It was four pages – front and back of 2 pages stapled together. This is great because we have been missing many of the issues from the Rag’s first year, including this very first edition.

A blogger’s sibling found it in some old files and sent it our way. We have scanned all four pages – see below – plus we have retyped all of the articles so you don’t have to squint and ruin your eyes. In addition, we have included all of the graphics and most of the hand-drawn headlines.

By Warren Patch

Ocean Beach has always been a colorful place. The Hippies seem to perpetually reinvent themselves there; long hair, short hair, dread hair, dirty hair, blue hair, no hair, it’s all cool. And tie-dye is still vogue. I buy mine at Sunshine Daydreams on Newport Avenue.

One of the all-time great characters of OB was Clint Carey, alias OB SPACEMAN. He used to sell plots of land on the moon. And he was the only OB’cean who had personally met the “Outer Space People” when they came visiting, and he alone was authorized to sell tickets for spaceship rides when they returned.